Terminology Update

Hey all! As some of you may have noticed, we’ve changed the name of the nation this first volume takes place in from “Vanias” to “Wenias”. Upon noticing a slight error in my anglicization of this name (the “v” vs the “w”), I immediately took action to replace all previous mention of it with the name used in the anime, both to rectify the error and to create greater homogeneity so as to reduce possible confusion between terms.

At some point in the future, we may expand our terminology page to act as a reference point and pronunciation guide to more easily convert between the two terminology sets. (For now, it’s just a help page explaining the difference between magic and sorcery, but don’t read it if you haven’t read through Chapter Two yet!)

11 thoughts on “Terminology Update”

I would leave it as Vanias. I wouldn’t necessarily trust the anime’s translation because Japanese doesn’t often make a distinction between v and w even though they have the katakana for it. A good example of the anime messing up v and w is during the Latin chant, when they translated video as wideo, as well as another Latin word that started with v (in Classical Latin, all v’s are pronounced with a “w” sound, so videre sounds like widere, which is the infinitive form of video).

I must respectfully disagree, as the “w” and “v” sounds in Japanese actually are distinct. The “ve” sound is voiced closer to a “be” in “bed” than a “we” in “west”, since the “v” sound is a relatively new concept in Japanese, while the “we” sound is voiced similarly to the “we” in “west”. From my own experience watching the anime, ウェニアス (the Japanese name) is pronounced in Japanese with a “we” sound and not a “be”-leaning “ve” sound, just as the ウェ rather than ヴェ would indicate. Thus, Wenias.

Now I’m not defending the anime’s translation, which has quite a few problems including mistranslations and poor phrasing, but this isn’t one of them. I’m curious about the Latin bit though, mind specifying which part of the episode that was?

Funnily enough, this chant was anime-only. The Latin to English translation is interesting, though for the anime’s subtitles, I suppose they didn’t know it was Latin and erroneously transcribed the lines by pronunciation.

Like you mentioned, if “v”s are pronounced as “w”s in Latin, then they are represented by “w” sounds in katakana as well, which is why the Japanese anime audio has them as “w” sounds.

A lot of mistranslations in the Latin actually. Wochare should be Vocare (infinitive form, meaning to call or invoke); westore should be either vesture (the English noun that descends from the Latin) or vestire (infinitive form, meaning to clothe or adorn, similar synonyms of course applies to all the translations); wedis should be vides (you see); kazam should be casam (accusative of casa, meaning house; dichael should be “de cael” (from the sky); miamnism should be “mi/me animi sum” (something like “I am my soul/will”); “habitent in” should be habitanti (meaning “to/for [one] residing/dwelling/lingering”); “charo rai” should be “caro rei” (meaning something like “in the flesh/body”)

What’s interesting is that it’s “ミザ・リ・キブ” in the actual text itself, with the “miza” and “ri” separate. If I had to guess, either the author isn’t particularly familiar with Latin, or the resemblance is fueled by confirmation bias and coincidental.

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